Abstract:

New research fields have emerged, and existing research fields have adopted new techniques to solve old problems. On the one hand, the ubiquitous adoption of AI in both SE research and development during the past 20 years has had a huge impact on the SE research community worldwide. On the other hand, it is still unclear whether Quantum Computing (QC) will have a similar impact on the SE research community at-large but some signals point into that direction.

In this session, we look deeper into the activities of the ISERN community related to AI and QC. For AI, we address a field of AI-based SE research that has picked up a lot of interest recently, e.g., the verification and validation of AI-based safety-critical autonomous driving systems. For QC, we discuss what might be expected from quantum computing now that it has started to be adopted in software engineering and even has become part of software engineering curricula at several universities.

Session Goals:

1. Survey the currently ongoing activities on SE for AI-based systems and AI for SE: What projects are ISERN members currently working on? What future trends and breakthroughs do these members foresee in the next 5 years?

2. Survey the currently ongoing activities in SE for QC-based systems and QC for SE: What projects are ISERN members currently working on? What future trends and breakthroughs do these members foresee in the next 5 years?

3. In both focus areas, identify common interests of ISERN members and opportunities for new collaborations.

Development of the Session: (How will the session be conducted? How much interaction?)

1. Intro Session by Chairs and additional speakers (max 10 min)

2. Ask participants whether there is more than just QC and AI for SE or vice versa? (5 min)

3. Interactive part I:
   This part aims at collecting topics of interest from the ISERN community.

   a) For SE→AI and AI→SE: Participants are asked to provide their input on sticky notes and put them on the topic walls (10 min).

   b) For SE→QC and QC→SE: Participants are asked to provide their input on sticky notes and put them on the topic walls (10 min).

   After a) and b) a consolidated map will be produced (by one session chair)

4. Interactive part II:
   This part aims at reviewing the map of topics and to add information on Collection on prioritization/timeline/impact on types of empirical studies in the ISERN community.

   a) Presentation of the consolidated output from 3a) and discussion/review with plenary (25 min).

   b) Presentation of the consolidated output from 3b) and discussion/review with plenary (25 min)

5. Plenary discussion on: What comes next? (5 min)

What means for interaction will be used or required?

Pitches, wall for sticky notes, pens to write on sticky notes, plenary session

Background and recommended reading:

1. V&V of AI-based systems
   a. Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Justus Bogner, Xavier Franch, Marc Oriol, Julien Siebert, Adam Trendowicz, Anna Maria Vollmer, and Stefan Wagner. 2022. Software Engineering for AI-Based Systems: A Survey. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 31, 2, Article 37e (April 2022), 59 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3487043

2. Quantum
   a. Zhao, J. (2020). Quantum Software Engineering: Landscapes and Horizons. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07047. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07047

   b. Weder, B., Barzen, J., Leymann, F., Salm, M., & Vietz, D. (2020, November). The Quantum software lifecycle. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Architectures and Paradigms for Engineering Quantum Software (pp. 2-9). https://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/publications/Weder2020_QuantumSoftwareLifecycle.pdf

   c. Piattini, M., Serrano, M., Pérez-Castillo, R., Peterssen, G. and Hevia, J.L. (2021) Towards a Quantum Software Engineering. IT Professional, 23, 62-66. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2020.3019522

   d. Piattini, M. (2021) Requirements for a Robust Quantum Software Development Environment. Cutter Business Technology Journal, 34, 12-17.

Expected Outcomes and Plan for Continuing the Work beyond ISERN:

1. For each of the two topics a map (2 slides per topic) showing the current activities and the interests for collaboration among ISERN members

2. Perhaps core groups can be identified that comes up with a (white) kind of roadmap paper